Thank you, Avram; thank you, innumerable Evil Overlord and Murphy's Laws of Combat contributors; thank you Debra Doyle, for suggesting that Murphy's Laws of Combat make great plot twists.

I wish I'd thought to ask Avram to put in a line that says it's a randomizer for the Evil Overlord Plot Generator, with link. When we tried to add that text to the line about reloading the page to get a new set, the whole thing stopped working, and we didn't have time this morning to stop and figure out why.

Never mind that for now. I like it just fine.

Basic stuff, I know. I tell ya, this was years ago!

Ulysses S. Grant's an even better example. You'd have to see him in war and in peace, with and without his family, and in situations that did and didn't involve money, in order to understand him.

This is why I'm uneasy about the idea one hears sometimes about all fiction being character-driven. Granted, you can't do without characters; but their context matters. If it weren't the Nineteenth Century and there wasn't a war on, Scarlett O'Hara would simply be irritating.

Always wearing flats when an escape seems imminent,
Shal